The Story of Lucy Gault

6

‘You should have better clothes, lady.’

Her mother had had a coat made in Mantua, pearls strung for her at a stall on the Ponte Vecchio. Her mother was never less than smart, and had acquired Italian ways and taken to Italian fashions. Her mother had delighted in the cherubs of Bellini, was kind to waiters and hotel maids, and spoke Italian with a natural ease. Her mother was recognized by beggars on the streets, her generosity famous in Montemarmoreo.

In the dining-room Lucy listened, and nodded now and again. ‘I used to wear her dresses,’ she said.

‘Well yes, of course.’

‘They’re all worn out now.’

‘Will we buy you a few new ones?’

She shook her head. Her clothes were what she chose to wear. She looked away, at the unlit fire in the grate, the black mantelpiece above it, the familiar blue stripes of the wallpaper. She pushed about on her plate food she didn’t want to eat. What terrible folly had possessed her? All these years to have so stubbornly waited for no more than an old man’s scattered words?

‘There was a balcony,’ he said, ‘and the people passing on the street below would call out “Buon appetito!” when the tablecloth was spread for lunch.’ The magician’s butterfly disappeared and then came back. There were processions on St Cecilia’s day. ‘All that,’ he said.

She drew her knife and fork together. The images she might herself have conjured up were too fragile to be talked away in dinner-time conversation over plates and dishes on a table, too precious to be offered as a triviality. She had come to terms with what was there to come to terms with; she had managed, but could not now. She could not grieve; no more than a fact it felt like that her mother was not alive.

‘The Mitchelstown Caves?’ her father said.

‘I’ve never been there.’

‘Shall we go?’

‘If you would like to.’

*

A few days later the Captain passed into his seventy-first year but did not say so, although he would have liked to. He wanted to share with his daughter what was sometimes considered to be a milestone in a life, but as that day advanced the inclination slipped away. He could not comfort her and it mattered more than the milestones of ageing that he could not.

He suffered for her. He understood the trait in her that had forbidden her to draw someone else into her disquiet: for that, she was remarkable but did not know it. Nor would there have been consolation if she had.

In the evenings after dinner they sat together in the drawing-room, her company dutifully there. She read. He smoked a single cigarillo and drank a little whiskey. Every evening it was the same.

But once, restless, Lucy put her book aside, sat for a moment doing nothing, and then lifted out her embroidery drawer from the sofa-table and placed it on the floor. She knelt beside it to sort out skeins of silk, needles, drawings on scraps of paper, stubs of pencil, linen pieces, pencil-sharpener, rubbers. As her father watched, she unfolded a wide rectangle of linen on which she had drawn one of her sketches. She spread it on the hearthrug, quite close to where he sat: seagulls were only just discernible as such, little more than specks on the sand; a curve of broken lines indicated the shingle beneath the cliffs. Two figures stood by the spit of rocks that poked out into the sea. The embroidery had been abandoned and her tears came while he watched her rearranging the drawer’s disorder; other sketches that had lain there were examined and bundled away, this one kept.

‘Lady,’ he murmured, but she did not hear.

The Captain lay awake that night, thinking that Heloise would have ordered all this better, would have been wise in what she said to their daughter and how she said it. Her practicality came into that. It was she who had wallpapered their bedroom when first she came to Lahardane, she who had insisted that the smoking of the breakfast-room fire could be cured and had been right, she who gave their summer parties and in December had a Christmas tree in the hall for the children of Kilauran.

He turned on his bedside lamp to look at the faded roses of the wallpaper, then turned it off again. In the darkness he got up and stretched out on the sofa beneath the windows, which he sometimes did when he couldn’t sleep. He might tiptoe across the landing, as once or twice he had, to gaze down at the soft fair hair spread on the pillow, eyes gently closed. But tonight he didn’t.

He dozed, quite easily in the end, and then in some Italian church the woman sacristan read the evening lesson. In the shaded corner of the piazza men played cards. ‘Love is greedy when it is starved,’ Heloise reminded him when they walked across the difficult paving. ‘Don’t you remember, Everard? Love is beyond all reason when it is starved.’

*

She would rather be anywhere but here, Lucy thought, and wished she hadn’t agreed to explore the caves at Mitchelstown.

On a damp morning she and her father were the only visitors. The way lit by their guide, they clambered over slippery rock beneath the stalactites, while the different caves were named for them: the House of Commons, the House of Lords, Kingston Gallery, O’Leary’s. They waited for the spiders that were peculiar to the place to creep out from the crevices, and afterwards they walked about the town that gave the caves their name. Its great, wide square and the Georgian elegance of a refuge for impecunious Protestants were its main attractions. Nothing remained of the once stately Mitchelstown Castle, burnt and looted the summer after petrol cans had been brought to Lahardane.

‘Eccentric family,’ her father said, ‘those poor mad Kingstons.’

They drove away, through rain that turned to mist. Men clearing out a ditch saluted them as they went by. They met no one else until they stopped in Fermoy, a town familiar to her father since his army days. ‘D’you know Fermoy?’ she remembered Ralph asking and of course she didn’t. He had driven to it in Mr Ryall’s car on a Wednesday afternoon before he’d ever been to Lahardane. He had driven to half the towns in County Cork, he’d said, before he knew her, and she imagined being with him, being with him now.

‘Nice old town,’ her father said.

They walked together on an empty pavement, the mist still falling. Turf smoke was cloying in the air. Cattle were being driven on the street.

‘Would we try for coffee here?’ her father said.

In the quiet lounge of a hotel a clock was ticking softly. A waitress in black and white stood by a window, the lace of the curtain pulled back a little. They took their coats off, piling them with their scarves on an empty sofa. They sat in armchairs and when the waitress came to them they ordered coffee.

‘And something – biscuits perhaps?’ Lucy’s father said.

‘I’ll bring you biscuits, sir.’

The clock struck twelve. The waitress returned with a coffee pot and a jug of milk, and a plate of pink-iced biscuits. An elderly couple came in, the woman holding on to her companion’s arm. They sat near the window where the waitress had been standing. ‘We need more nails,’ the man remembered when they were settled. ‘And Keating’s Powder.’

Lucy broke a biscuit in half. The coffee had a scalded taste; the sweetness of the icing was a help. Marriage was not for ever any more. Marriage could be set aside, as often these days it was: in Ireland too it could be set aside.

‘That guide didn’t know much,’ her father said.

‘Not much.’

The waitress brought tea for the couple who had come in. It was fair day in Fermoy, she said, and the old woman said they knew: you couldn’t not, the state of the streets. Oh, something shocking, the waitress agreed. Six o’clock in the morning the cattle started to come in: she was watching them earlier. She came from Glanworth herself, she said before she went away; she often used see the cattle driven on the roads all night, going to the Fermoy fair.

‘We’re old familiars here,’ the old woman called across the lounge and Lucy tried to smile. Her father said he’d known the hotel a long time ago.

‘Everything’s long ago now,’ the old woman said.

Teaspoons rattled on their saucers. The clock ticked in a silence; then the old man’s whisper became loud because his companion had indicated that she couldn’t hear. He was ashamed that they had fleas in the house, he said. Coming in off the fowls or not, he was ashamed.

‘Lady.’

Already, a moment ago, her father had tried for her attention; she’d been aware of that.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Early on, I wrote letters I didn’t post.’

She didn’t understand; she didn’t know what letters he meant. She shook her head.

Enquiries had been natural in the circumstances, her father explained, and told how he had stamped each envelope, how he had afterwards kept the letters by him. Years later he had dropped them, one by one, into the fire and watched the blackened paper curling before it fell away.

‘All that,’ he said, and there was something about her mother not wanting ever to know the news from Ireland, and how his love had caused him too assiduously to protect her and take from her a greater marvel than she saw in pictures. He sought no sympathy but blankly laid out these facts as if apologizing for some failure in himself.

She nodded. In novels people ran away. And novels were a reflection of reality, of all the world’s desperation and of its happiness, as much of one as of the other. Why should mistakes and foolishness – in reality too – not be put right while still they might be? The pleas there’d been, the certainty that this was what mattered most, everything so often repeated, the longing, the begging: word for word, spoken, written, all became a torrent in Lucy’s head while her father was silent and she was silent too. She heard the old man complaining that when people went away from the house they noticed they had fleas in their clothes. You couldn’t hold your head up.

‘I can’t not tell you,’ her father said, ‘that the guilt your mother felt was a bit too much for her.’

‘I’m glad you’ve told me.’

The old man stood up. The rain had stopped, he said, and the two gathered up their belongings. Coins were left on the table before, slowly, the old couple went away, clinging to one another again. The Captain and his daughter sat in silence then.

*

Back and forth, back and forth, the digger crossed Malley’s slope, prodding at the rocks, lifting one to the pile when it was loose enough. Against the rabbits, every inch of the fencing would have to be renewed, the mesh at the bottom dug six inches in. Yesterday Ralph had ordered the saplings. Ashes and maples would change the landscape, seen for miles around when they strengthened and spread.

From where he stood at the edge of the steeply sloping field he could see a rabbit, and then another one, scuttling into a clump of undergrowth. So often you have wanted to come back to Lahardane. So many times I was foolish. Already, perfectly, he could remember where each word fell, how the lines broke on the single page that had been his for only a day. How could it be wrong of us?

How could it be? To sit down at the slatted table on the lawn, to walk once more on the strand, to meet her father and then to drive away? The digger’s engine spluttered before it gathered strength again. Undisturbed, the rabbits ran about.

Another Wednesday afternoon; by chance it would be that and they would notice and would say it. There’d be the sunlight through the chestnut branches, the white hall door half open. There’d be the silence of the cobbled yard, the rooks as still as stone on the high chimneys. There’d be her laughter and her smile, there’d be her voice. He wouldn’t want to go away. In all his life remaining he wouldn’t want to.

The digger’s driver clambered down and crossed the slope to say he’d come back and shoot the rabbits. Catch them in his tractor’s headlights and then begin to pick them off, maybe a hundred you’d catch in a night. A lifetime otherwise it would take to rid the place of them.

Ralph nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and the man lit a cigarette, wanting to talk about the rabbits, wanting to have a break. ‘Come over any time,’ Ralph said. Next week, the man promised, and ambled back to his machine.

Even for a few minutes, even just to look in. How could it be wrong? ‘Lemybrien,’ he could say. ‘There’s been a felling of old oaks at Lemybrien.’ Casually at breakfast over the last cup of tea, the dishes not yet gathered from the table, he could say he should maybe go over and take a look at what there was. ‘While we’re still slack. I wouldn’t want to miss that timber.’ And sandwiches would be made to see him through the journey, and he’d wait for them, a flask filled too. Clonroche, then Ballyanne, not in a hurry passing through Lemybrien, because it would feel wrong to be in a hurry. He’d have no appetite for the sandwiches when he stopped and he’d wonder what to do with them and would throw them down for the birds before he drove on. Her father’s hand would be held out when he drove up and she wouldn’t be there at first and then would come from the house. He closed his eyes, yet none of it went away, and when it did he didn’t want it to.

Still playfully, the rabbits scampered. Back and forth the digger went. Another rock was added to the pile.

‘Oh, God!’ Ralph crunched the invocation out and felt tears warm behind his eyes. ‘Oh God, where is your pity now?’